Earlier, at her gravesite, the herd of mourners surrounding the hole in the earth that held her coffin, his father had kicked at a pile of nearby dirt, and stepped back. Arched his eyebrows at the boy. As the other men watched, the boy had begun to shovel. He had not felt up to the task and had not been prepared, and his doubt had slowed his shovelling. The sound the dirt made as it struck the wood like drumming fingers on a tree. The sun glowed against the surface of her coffin until he had covered it in thick clods and then it grew lifeless, dull, a feature of the landscape. None of the other men helped him at all, and in their stares and sorrow the boy sensed an importance about this act he could not fathom. When he had finished he dropped the shovel into the dirt. The clanging sound like a slap to the ear. He looked to his father for forgiveness. Wordless disapproval instead in the man's clenched fist, the way his mouth had creased. The boy felt he'd failed whatever test he'd been set.
To Become a Whale tells the story of 13-year-old Sam Keogh, whose mother has died. Sam has to learn how to live with his silent, hitherto absent father, who decides to make a man out of his son by taking him to work at Tangalooma, then the largest whaling station in the southern hemisphere. What follows is the devastatingly beautiful story of a gentle boy trying to make sense of the terrible reality of whaling and the cruelty and alienation of his new world, the world of men. Set around Moreton Island and Noosa in 1961, To Become a Whale is an extraordinarily vivid and haunting novel that reads like an instant classic of Australian literature. There are echoes of Craig Silvey, Favel Parrett, Tim Winton and Randolph Stow in this moving, transformative and very Australian novel.
